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How to Build a Successful Go-to-Market Strategy

A well-conceived Go-to-Market Strategy is essential to gaining buy-in and achieving predictable goals. It needs to be easy to communicate, and therefore conciseness and simplicity are important. It’s amazing how many technology marketing companies manage to complicate it. Even the best marketers sometimes take a simple process, make it seem complex, and then spend an inordinate amount of time turning it back into a new, shiny, simplified process – all in hopes of impressing the client.

We have to admit, we’ve been guilty of succumbing to this ‘reinvention of the process wheel’. We are a technology marketing agency, and we’ve been known to develop a crazy diagram (or two) in the past, all with the goal of explaining what we do. But we can say with confidence that the years of trial and error are behind us. We’ve figured out the formula for building a successful Go-to-Market Strategy.

3 Key Elements of a Successful Go-to-Market Strategy are:

Market Intelligence

Market Segmentation (Verticals)

Brand Promise

Market Intelligence

For any B2B Go-to-Market Strategy, a basic demonstrated understanding of the market is needed. The best way to ascertain this information is a combination of primary and secondary market research. In the technology marketing space, there are so many resources available – from publishers like IDG and UBM to research companies like Forrester – that finding the information is the easy part. It’s taking that valuable research and analyzing it that can be trickier. Here are a few questions to think about as your examining your findings: Customer Research:

Who are my customers?

Where are they?

What is their job title?

And most importantly, what is it that keeps them up at night?

Market Research:

What is my market?

Is it a young market or a more mature market?

Who are my competitors and what are they saying?

How am I competing within this market with regard to price, expertise, functionality, etc.?

Market Segmentation

The second element in a successful Go-to-Market Strategy is market segmentation. Your findings from the market research determine who is most likely to purchase your product, solution, or service. From experience, many clients initially tell us that their target market is something broad, like “CIO’s in midsized IT companies”, but after analyzing the research they see that the market is actually narrower than that. What you are looking for is not just someone that could buy your solution, but someone that needs it.

Brand Promise

This is the juncture where your market research, your identified target market, and your solution meet. And in technology marketing, this is where the rubber hits the road. This space is very crowded, and it is not easy to craft a Brand Promise that is different enough from competitors, that still resonates with your target market. To help you think about crafting your Brand Promise, keep these questions in mind:

Is what you are bringing to market something that is needed by your target market?

What supports your claim that your solution will fulfill their need?

Why should your target market believe you?

Now that you’ve read through this post and can see what the three key elements to building a successful Go-to-Market Strategy are, aren’t you ready to get started? Great, because we’ve got an in-depth guide that will walk you through the 5-steps you can take to build your own successful Go-to-Market Strategy.